This project will lay the groundwork for a national program of surveys to collect data on people and social institutions that complement ongoing and anticipated hydrologic and ecological data collection efforts and are capable of answering two fundamental science questions:
Q1: What drives the human behavioral, institutional, and infrastructural decisions that affect the functioning of coupled water systems across the range of natural and socio-political environments found within the U.S.?; and Q2: What are the opportunities for and limits to protection of water-related ecosystem services and future water supplies in the face of climate uncertainty, growing demands on water resources, and advancing technologies?
The project will: (1) build awareness in and receive input from the scientific community concerning survey objectives and design; (2) engage with mission agencies (e.g., NOAA, USEPA, USDA, USGS, BLS) to explore opportunities to draw on existing sources of physical, biological, and social data; (3) organize and conduct a design/scoping workshop focusing on specific research goals and strategies for data collection and integration; and (4) recommend further steps in survey development and design.
Project Objectives 1. Specify a detailed research agenda that will drive the design of a national survey aimed at understanding the dynamics of coupled water systems; 2. Identify the most suitable survey (e.g., internet, mail, in-person), sampling (e.g., frequencies, stratification), and quality assurance methods for different strata of human systems (e.g., individuals, water systems, nongovernmental organizations) in different natural systems (e.g., characterized according to current and future drought- and flood-frequencies and dominant sources and issues – i.e., surface and groundwater, quantity and quality ), and how to integrate them with existing survey programs; 3. Demonstrate how data from this program of research will be integrated with ecological and hydrologic observations, and other sources of social data, to address research questions about coupled water systems. Intellectual Impacts Sustainability of an adequate supply of clean water is a top goal of almost every national and international environmental agenda. Solutions to water problems inevitably will involve changes in institutions, behaviors, and the natural environment. These forces underscore the need for a better scientific understanding of human perceptions and behaviors associated with water. Scientific understanding of human-water dynamics is undermined by imbalances in the availability of fundamental data. Hydrologic and ecological data, while incomplete, are far more available than behavioral and institutional data concerning water use, attitudes, and values. The lack of data on the human aspects of coupled water systems hampers our ability not only to characterize human motivations and behaviors in relation to water, but also to create hydrologic and ecological models that incorporate the dynamics of human impacts and institutions. This project examined research and data aspirations of water professionals, assessed the potential of existing large-scale data collection efforts to address fundamental research needs, and convened experts to consider the most significant data gaps and how they might be filled. The primary findings include: 1. Natural scientists and engineers have less experience with social data than social scientists with natural system data, both groups have strong interest in human dimensions of water science, and there are disciplinary differences in data priorities. There is general agreement across the groups represented in our sample on the need for data on individual attitudes, preferences and behaviors, and information on the existence of distinct groups in the population. Data are generally sought at household and community levels, and at annual time intervals, with science questions needing more frequent data and policy questions needing less frequent data. 2. Current data collection efforts conducted at national scale with replication over time produce very little information about human interactions with water and employ samples that do not match in terms of location or timing. When combined to address issues that require linking human perceptions or behaviors to specific water conditions, the resulting matched samples are unrepresentative of the broader populations of people and water quality conditions. Nevertheless, analysis of the matched data indicates that new insights are possible through analysis at large spatial scale (e.g., national). 3. To understand more fully how humans and the water environment affect each other: a) A coupled observation program is needed; b) New "clustering" methods for characterizing a spatial unit needed to integrate point and aggregated (for privacy) data, and to better link social and environmental data; c) Core observations should be collected nationally while customized observations might be used for specific regions or sectors; d) Sampling should be performed longitudinally to capture changes over time and supplemented for extreme events; e) GIS-based web services comparable to the Hydrologic Information System developed by the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Sciences (CUAHSI), incorporating existing data sets as well as findings from complementary surveys, would facilitate broad community access; f) the proposed activity is long-term in nature and requires leadership of young and mid-career researchers able to see it through to realization. Broader Impacts 1. One doctoral candidate in Agricultural & Consumer Economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was centrally involved in workshop organization, development and implementation of an online survey, and assessment and analysis of national-scale social and environmental data sets. 2. Findings were presented to representatives of leading federal water agencies, including US Environmental Protection Agency, US Department of Agriculture, and US Geological Survey, in an effort to expose existing data limitations and encourage interagency collaboration to address them. 3. The 2011 National Survey on the Water Environment – Exploratory Questionnaire and the data it produces are freely available online to researchers and others at the link: http://hdl.handle.net/2142/45891
